Papadopoulos & Sons (Case Study 2): Director Q&A

Marcus Markou, the director of Papadopoulos & Sons, came into school to give us a question and answer session about the journey in the making of his first feature film.
These were the top five main points I felt I had learnt from the discussion:

1) Marcus drew specific aspects from his own life, in the past, and from his Greek heritage throughout the film. James Papadoupoulos, in the film, wanted to discontinue his Law Degree at university even though his father was against it. This mirrors the director's life at that age who (in reality) realised he then wanted to learn drama, then going onto pursue the film industry.

2) Marcus had to distribute money accordingly, due to his tight budget. During pre-production, he hired a Line Producer (Sarah Butler), who would read the script and work out the budget for individual shots. If a shot was thought to be too expensive to film, it would get cut from the script. Marcus also persuaded actors to join the cast because they loved the script, as opposed to large amounts of money. Stephen Dillane (Harry Papadopoulos) even had Game of Thrones postpone the shooting schedule back a week for the one-off opportunity to act in a film with his son, Frank Dillane, who would be playing father and son.

3) We learnt about Marcus' clever marketing techniques to reduce the cost. He took the free and easy path of social media, with sites like Twitter and Facebook it was simple to voice his film to potentially anyone. This platform of marketing gained about 15,000 likes. This was more cost-effective than a TV commercial or a poster on a bus, on top of that it probably would have reached the about same amount of public attention.

4) Marcus was a believer that this type of work was less of a job and he saw it as something more enjoyable, which is why he did not care too much for a profit for the film, he was interested in breaking-even and benefiting from the whole experience. As an example of this, on the first day he tried his best to avoid the typical hierarchy of the industry taking over, by placing himself at the level of the actors, the equipment team, the extras etc. This would give the whole cast and crew a sense of family and togetherness, which was the perfect atmosphere for a family film like Papadopoulos & Sons.

5) When marketing the film and deciding on a specific audience, Marcus said none came to mind. He believed that it would appeal generally to families as well as individual viewers of all ages due to the multi-generational cast. Furthermore he discovered that the appeal of the Greek community across the UK to be astoundingly large. To follow this, Marcus took it upon himself to contact as many Greek churches as possible on in the UK, making them aware of the independent film's release. In addition to this, he used Twitter to directly tweet any UK fish and chip shops (particularly in London) to ask 'if they had the chance to see a film about a fish and chip shop, would they?', in most cases the answer was yes.